Hyper-engaged Gamification for the Masses

Fanzy is an exciting San Francisco startup launching the world’s first social loyalty network. I spoke with company co-founder, Tuhin Roy at ad:tech San Francisco to get more insight into the company’s strategy. “We are disrupting the social loyalty and engagement market,” he explained, “by providing powerful tools for marketers to understand, engage and reward influential fans for spreading the word about their brand.”

Fanzy gamifies the experience of being a fan by rewarding fans for their social activity around brands, TV shows, films, celebrities, sports teams, athletes and consumer brands. As Fanzy members generate buzz for your brand, they unlock real life rewards, social achievements (badges) and are ranked for each Fanzy they join based on Fanzy’s proprietary FanScore.

Once installed, brands upload images, define keywords and videos that they want their fans to share and customize calls to action. Keywords can include marketing messages and links to videos, photos or websites. Marketers then have access to a robust rewards builder that enables them to target rewards to influential fans across the Fanzy network based on specific social loyalty achievements (such as sharing a video and getting likes) or based on their level of influence.

Affordability Far Beyond the Competition

Tuhin stresses the company’s focus is building an affordable solution that even small brands can tap into. “If a brand wants to hire an agency to build a custom Facebook solution it can cost in excess of $150,000. To use another popular gamification platform is $2,000-$5,000 monthly. Ours is $69.95 a month.” The team of seasoned entrepreneurs at Frenzy has focused the company on building out its network of brands. In this way, it was important for the company to make the price-point, as Tuhin likes to call it, “next to free.”

Anyone can start a Fanzy brand, and deliberately so. For example, without naming names, someone on the Fanzy team is a really big Justin Bieber fan, and because Justin didn’t have a branded Fanzy page, he was able to launch one. That page has now taken on a life of its own, and is developing a following. For fans, this is terrific way to generate engagement and a mechanism self-expression. And the way the system works, it’s incredibly valuable for brands, as well. At any point, the true brand owner can “take over” their Fanzy page and do with it what they want. Meanwhile, the brand grows independent of any ad budget, resources, or effort.

Huge Loyalty & Engagement

Navigating through some of the most popular Fanzy pages, it became obvious these are vastly popular web properties. Tuhin explained, “The average Facebook user has 120 friends. The average Fanzy user has 340.” Having a glimpse at platform’s detailed analytics, Tuhin showed me brands reaching an audience 12x greater on their Fanzy page than their own Facebook fan page.

Those are huge numbers at any price point. And apparently, brands are taking note—the company now boasts 15,000 of them and growing.